not having Gurgurk's head on the point of it. Gurgurk,
they reported, had fled to Keegark by air the night before, which
explained the incident of the unaccountable aircar and lorry. The
Channel Battery stopped firing, and, with the exception of an
occasional spatter of small-arms fire, the city fell silent.

At 1600, von Schlichten visited the headquarters Pickering had set up
in the office building at the power-plant. As he stepped off the lift
on the third floor, a girl, running down the hall with her arms full
of papers in folders, collided with him; the load of papers flew in
all directions. He stooped to help her pick them up.

"Oh, general! Isn't it wonderful?" she cried. "I just can't believe
it!"

"Isn't what wonderful?" he asked.

"Oh, don't you know? They've got it!"

"Huh? They have?" He gathered up the last of the big envelopes and
gave them to her. "When?"

"Just half an hour ago. And to think, those books were around here all
the time, and.... Oh, I've got to run!" She disappeared into the lift.

Inside the office, one of Pickering's engineers was sitting on the
middle of his spinal column, a stenograph-phone in one hand and a book
in the other. Once in a while, he would say something into the
mouthpiece of the phone. Two other nuclear engineers had similar books
spread out on a desk in front of them; they were making notes and
looking up references in the _Nuclear Engineers' Handbook_, and making
calculations with their sliderules. There was a huddle around the
drafting-boards, where two more such books were in use.

"Well, what's happened?" he demanded, catching Pickering by the arm as
he rushed from one group to another.

"Ha! We have it!" Pickering cried. "Everything we need! Look!"

He had another of the books under his arm. He held it out to von
Schlichten, and von Schlichten suddenly felt sicker than he had ever
felt since, at the age of fourteen, he had gotten drunk for the first
time. He had seen men crack up under intolerable strain before, but
this was the first time he had seen a whole roomful of men blow their
tops in the same manner.

The book was a novel--a jumbo-size historical novel, of some seven or eight
hundred pages. Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-length
picture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earrings
and a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her affiliation
with the class of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. In t